Manka Dhingra announced her victory in Washington state’s 45th District Senate race Tuesday night at the Redhook Brewery in Woodinville, an appropriately good-times setting to hand control of the state’s legislative chamber to her fellow Democrats.

By knocking out the last GOP-held legislative body on the West Coast, Dhingra’s victory means one thing:

The Great Blue Wall is back in place.

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On an election day when Democratic candidates unseated their Republican rivals in races from Virginia to Maine to New Jersey, delivering what the Seattle Times called the “GOP’s most significant day of defeat in the young Trump presidency,” Dhingra’s victory in Washington state over Republican Jinyoung Englund means the West Coast is now the solid center of the resistance, with Democrats controlling legislatures and governorships from Seattle down to San Diego.

As the New York Times reports, Washington State Senate leader Sharon Nelson “conveyed the party’s grand aspirations in an almost Trump-like phrase:”

“A blue wall,” she said, stretching “from the Canadian border to the Mexican border.”

Dhingra, who thanked the brewpub crowd and took a congratulatory call from former Vice President Joe Biden, came out on top in the the highest-profile race in Washington’s legislature in years (and its most expensive ever at $9 million), claiming 55 percent of the vote in the nearly-completed count on Wednesday. The victory, assuming it holds, brings a huge shot of political adrenaline, not just for the first-time candidate in Dhingra but for Democrats across the country who see this week’s races as bellwethers for more anti-Trump changes to come.

Each win, say Democrats, constitutes a thumbs-down for President Trump by voters.

(Only a spoil-sport would note that the Democrats now have full political control of just eight states, while the Republicans have the same in 26 states.)

The lead for Dhingra, a first-time candidate and senior deputy prosecutor for King County, had Democrats’ heads spinning at the implications.

Might the West Coast states band together on issues like gun control, marijuana legalization, and environmental regulation? Could there even be a regional cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions, jumping off California’s regime and including even Canada?

“We become the last brick in the big blue wall up and down the West Coast,” state Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlodowski told supporters at election-night party for Dhingra, the senior deputy prosecutor for King County.

The Los Angeles Times headline in advance of yesterday’s election called it “A West Coast Wall of Trump Resistance.”

“A state Senate race pitting two campaign novices in the upscale suburbs east of Seattle,” wrote the paper’s Mark Z. Barabak, “has turned into a major battle between the two national parties, becoming the costliest legislative contest in state history and serving as a test of the Trump effect far from the other Washington.”

The GOP, of course, is smarting from the polling-places bruising it has taken this week.

“If you have one-party rule… you can see what happens in Seattle,” said Susan Hutchison, the state GOP chair, using what the LA Times called “Republican shorthand depicting the city as a slough of drugs, homelessness and wacky liberalism.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.